The Prevention of Corruption (Amendment) Bill of 2018 brings about a change in a 30 year-old law defining and penalizing corruption in the Indian public system. The newly introduced law aims to provide a more comprehensive definition of bribery. To a country ranking 81 out of the 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, and with its complex regulatory procedures and tax systems, it is not uncommon for an organization to encounter an unfavorable situation with a public official.

“The name of the game — moving the money from your client’s pocket to your pocket,”said actor Matthew McConaughey, playing fraudster Mark Hannah in the Hollywood blockbuster The Wolf of Wall Street. The irony of this quote is not lost on the people of Malaysia.

We all know this well-worn concept: An organization’s reputation takes years to develop, but it can collapse overnight if it didn’t originally possess integrity from the top down. “It took 160 years for Siemens to build a reputation and only five minutes to ruin it,” said Dr. Andreas Pohlmann, the former chief compliance officer of Siemens, at the 29th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference in June. A little ill-gotten profit means nothing if a business has to close its bank accounts when it goes belly up.

Corrupt politicians are a common trope in society, but what's more uncommon is how to spot the red flags of shady dealings. Breakout speaker Michael Schidlow, CFE, CAMS-Audit, head of financial crime risk training and emerging risk advisory at HSBC Bank, took attendees at the 29th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference in Las Vegas last month on a ride through the world of political corruption combining pop culture references with infamous real-world examples involving names like Gaddafi and Putin.

Bryan Fogel has most likely never performed a ratio analysis on corporate financial statements or testified in court during a fraud trial, but the story he told through the Academy Award-winning documentary, ICARUS, resonates with what we do as fraud examiners.